This past March marked the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a decade of fighting, which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, destroyed an entire country, and destabilized the broader Middle East. As journalist Matt Kennard argues in his new book, Irregular Army, the war in...

I recently spoke with, Peter Watt, Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Sheffield, and co-author of a new study examining Mexico's disastrous fight against narcotrafficking, Drug War Mexico. We discussed the origins and development of the Mexican drug trade, the intersections between neoliberal economic...

The past decade has not been kind to Mexico. Since officially transitioning from one-party rule in 2000, the country has witnessed the perverse effects of neoliberal economic policies, the striking rise in power of locally based drug traffickers, state-sponsored violence that has left tens of thousands dead and countless others...

This fall, I assigned Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson's Why Nations Fail as part of my international political economy course, and so I've been reading this massive study in preparation for our upcoming seminars on it. I was tickled, then, to notice Jeff Sachs' review of...

For nearly 50 years, Jonathan Kozol has documented the landscape of impoverished America. Since the appearance of his landmark memoir Death at an Early Age, which detailed his experiences as a teacher in the Boston public school system, Kozol has produced perhaps the most influential body of work illustrating...

Amidst ongoing controversy surrounding the results of last Sunday's presidential election in Mexico, the declared winner of the contest, Enrique Peña Nieto, is unambiguously organizing to take over the government come December. The election was marked by claims of fraud, irregularities, and manipulation by the major media in favor of...

In an astonishing act of civil disobedience, local residents of Toribio, a small town in southwest Colombia, demanded that government forces fighting the rebel FARC go home -- and destroyed their fortifications to underscore the point. The town has been witness to especially brutal violence in recent days...

Earlier this spring, Moisés Naím provocatively warned against an emerging menace facing our world today -- the advent of what he terms the "mafia state." Analyzing the role of transnational organized crime in the age of globalization has been Naím's bailiwick for some years now, and familiar readers...

A leaked document posted at Public Citizen last night offers a stark reminder of the rising power transnational corporations enjoy in the domestic settings of nation-states where they do business. The Huffington Post's Zach Carter writes that "The newly leaked document is one of...